In the Season of the Sun (17 page)

“J
acob, are we always gonna be brothers?”

“Jacob, are we always gonna be brothers?”

Tom saw his older brother. He heard the stalks of buffalo grass rustle in the wind. He felt the tremor in the earth as the war party rode past.

“Stay here, Tom.”

The scene had changed as the years passed. The dream was no longer an exact re-creation of the moment but close enough for Tom to feel the fear again, a young boy's fear, and to taste the dryness in his mouth.

Jacob held out the ring for his younger brother to take. Tom watched the ten-year-old, his own boyish image, take the ring.

Jacob turned to leave.

Don't go!
This was new, for Tom usually watched him leave without calling out.
Don't go! You're running to your death! Jacob, no!
The scene unfolded as it always did. Jacob shrank into the distance. He ran for all he was worth up the slope; he was crouched low and his long-legged gait propelled him swiftly away.

Jacob!
A last lingering echo died in his sleep, reverberating in the barren hallway of his mind as the darkness closed around and the image of a grassy slope dissolved.

What am I doing here? I don't want to be here. Wake up, you fool
.

Another image, another memory. Nightmares stacked one upon the other like children's blocks. Only this wasn't play.

Tom could smell the stench of blood, and his lungs burned from powder smoke. Gunfire and the cries of a wounded man, a Kiowa brave. It didn't matter that the Shoshoni had killed his parents, in Tom's eyes, every heathen savage shared the blame.

The hunting party never knew what hit them. One moment they had been returning to their village with a travois loaded with fresh meat, and the next, two of the braves were shot dead and another two tumbled from their mounts, mortally wounded.

Still, Tom watched himself toss the Hawken aside, leap from behind a slab of granite, and vault through the air. He dragged a brave from horseback and they rolled a few yards down the slope. Gunfire echoed across the hillside. He ignored the sound, his attention centered on the Kiowa, who sprang to his feet and, tomahawk in hand, charged the young man who had knocked him from his horse.

In his sleep, Tom tensed as he had on the slope, watching the brave hurl toward him. He palmed his belly gun, a short-barreled percussion pistol. He thumbed the hammer, and the gun kicked in his hand. The Kiowa flew backward as if plucked from the ground by an invisible snare. He landed hard and doubled up, holding his belly. Blood seeped through his fingers.

Tom crawled to his feet and walked toward the brave and stood beside the warrior. The Kiowa began to sing his death chant through clenched teeth.

“That's right, sing your dying song, you bastard,” Tom said as he calmly reloaded. His shadow fell across the man. The warrior's eyes burned with hatred; his features were drawn and pain filled as he watched the man who had shot him.

“Does it hurt?” Tom asked. He stared dispassionately at the man. Blood continued to seep from the wound. A gut-shot man took a while to the … and every moment was filled with pain. Tom opened his shirt and dangled the snake ring in front of the dying man's face. He nudged the brave with his boot. The Kiowa groaned in response.

“This is for my family, you murdering red devil. Take your time; die slow.”

Farther up the hill, Kilhenny, Pritchard, and Wallace were rummaging among the dead men littering the hillside. Coyote Kilhenny finished off the wounded braves with a quick thrust of his knife. Tom could have done the same. Instead, he sat by the man he had shot and watched him die.

The warrior at last succumbed—the life light in his eyes dimmed; his breath grew ragged, labored, then ceased.

Tom experienced the warm satisfaction of a job well done. He remembered the feeling even now, months later. And yet there was more, a sense of loss as well, something he didn't understand but felt all the same.

His family massacred, a score of red men had been killed in retribution. Dreams showed Tom what he refused to see in life.

In his dream, Tom sat by the dead man on the slope. He glanced down expecting to find the Kiowa's visage frozen in death. But the dead man had changed. The Kiowa was gone. Tom saw the face of death, but it was his own.

He bolted upright, his hands clawing the empty air, his lips drawn back in a silent scream that reverberated in the back of his skull. The image of his dead self shattered like glass.

The hotel room materialized in the pre-dawn light—faded brown-and-tan-covered walls, a dresser, washstand, and basin, and the creaky brass bed in which he slept. Heat was funneled up from a furnace below, and by the chilly interior of the room and his breath vapor billowing in the air, Tom figured the management was conserving coal.

A cold sweat streaked his features. Tom swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. The dream had left him shaken. He padded across the cold hardwood floor to the window fronting onto the pier and the silty brown expanse of the Missouri. The night sky grew lighter with the approaching dawn. He had hours yet to sleep. But the dream had bested him. He pulled the room's only chair up to the window, wrapped himself in a blanket, and found the bottle of the house whiskey that he'd been nursing since last evening. He sloshed the contents and sat before the window.

And there Tom waited, for the morning, for an end to night.

18

“H
old still, damn it,” Iron Mike bellowed as the girl standing against the wall began to tremble like a frightened bird. Hester was one of Junie's “doves,” a dimple-cheeked sixteen-year-old mulatto whore in a camisole and nightdress and stocking feet. Skintop Pritchard had carried her downstairs to settle a bet between himself and Iron Mike. The girl squared her shoulders against the wall. She tried to hold her head still to keep the rum from sloshing over the lip of the pewter tankard balanced on her head. Her mousy brown hair was already plastered to her skull from the first dousing she had received.

“Please Mr. Pritchard,” Hester called to the man with the smooth-shaved skull standing alongside Iron Mike's squat frame.

“Shut up,” Pritchard snapped back. He winked at Iron Mike. “Go on, Mike, take your best shot and if you miss … well,… don't hit any part I aim to screw.” Iron Mike and the men standing around him laughed at Pritchard's remark.

Distant thunder rumbled outside the walls of the River Wheel Saloon, then rain began to lash the night-darkened windows where the wind drove it under the eaves of the building. In sharp contrast to the storm's sudden noisy arrival, the interior of the saloon was unnaturally quiet. Riverboatmen and trappers steered clear of the girl against the wall and left a wide aisle as Hester closed her eyes and tried to pray.

Skintop Pritchard tilted a jug of home brew to his lips and poured enough raw spirits down his throat to pickle a calf. He slammed the jug down on the nearest table and howled.

“Yeeeaaahhhhh! I'm a twister with lightning for blood and thunder in my guts. Keep your distance, boys, or Mike here'll part your hair with his Hawken.”

“Bah!” Iron Mike raised his rifle to his shoulder and sighted on the tankard.

“A blind man couldn't miss from this distance,” Pritchard dryly remarked.

Iron Mike glared at him, then shrugged. He grabbed for the jug and finished off the fiery remains of the River Wheel's house whiskey, a nefarious concoction of corn mash, red peppers, Missouri River water, tonic, and a dash of black powder. “Gawdam, but that stuff'd grow hair on a skillet,” the trapper gasped. Then with eyes watering he stumbled to the far end of the saloon. He braced himself against the doorsill until his head cleared. The raw liquor ate at his guts; he'd passed his limit and wanted nothing more than to sleep it off. But he wasn't about to let Pritchard's claim go unsettled. Iron Mike could shoot rings around Skintop Pritchard any day of the week and he meant to prove it once and for all.

“Gimme a mirror. Someone fetch me a mirror,” Iron Mike bellowed.

“Don't you worry, Mike, reckon little Hester thinks you look fetching just the way you are,” Spence Mitchell called out from a nearby table.

“Go to hell, Spence,” Iron Mike retorted.

Spence Mitchell raised a liquor bottle in salute. “I'm on my way,” he said. He combed his fingers through his liquor-and-tobacco-mottled beard. His lips curled back, revealing a row of black, broken teeth.

One of the trappers fished for a moment among his possibles and produced a shard of mirror, an irregularly shaped piece showing roughly four inches of shiny surface.

“Here you be, Iron Mike.” The man tossed his find to the marksman.

“Thankee, Mr. Schaefer.” Iron Mike turned to Skintop Pritchard standing nearby. “Now you'll see some real shooting.” He picked up his rifle and settled the heavy barrel on his shoulder as he turned his back to the girl against the far wall. He cocked the rifle; the metallic “click” booming ominously in the suddenly quiet room.

The rifle, pointing back over Iron Mike's shoulder, began to waver as the trapper tried to focus on the image in the mirror.

“Be still, damn you,” he yelled, though the girl hadn't budged. He tried to steady the hand holding the mirror, cursed to himself, and wiped his forearm across his eyes as perspiration began to bead his sunburned brow.

“You getting nervous, Mike?” Pritchard said, enjoying himself.

“Wait and see.” Iron Mike curled his thumb around the trigger, raised his left hand holding the mirror, and centered a reflection in the glass. It should have been Hester, frozen in mute terror, flat against the wall.

But a man's image dominated the shiny bit of looking glass that Iron Mike held before him. Tom Milam stood in front of the girl, a pistol in his hand and aiming, seemingly so, at the man with the rifle.

“Sonuvabitch!” Iron Mike yelled in horror as Tom fired. The pistol roared like a cannon in the close confines of the saloon. The mirror exploded in Iron Mike's grasp, and the trapper tumbled to the floor, his right ear burned by the slug fanning past. As a glossy mist settled on the floor, Iron Mike's rifle belched flame. The men in the saloon ducked out of sight as the lead ball ricocheted around the room before thudding into a panel of the bar.

“You bastard,” Iron Mike roared as he staggered to his feet. Blood seeped from a dozen tiny cuts on his left hand. Slivers of glass jutted from his palm.

Tom ignored him and turned to the girl. “Get out of here.”

“God bless you, Mister,” Hester said as she passed him the tankard and darted toward a back door.

“Don't bet on it,” Tom replied and tasted the rum. He holstered his pistol, drew a second weapon from his waistband, and sighted on Iron Mike as the trapper grabbed for Skintop Pritchard's rifle and swung around toward the young man who had humiliated him. Iron Mike brought up sharply and froze in mid-motion seeing that Tom had another pistol trained on him.

Tom grinned and hoisted the tankard in his left hand. “To your good health, Iron Mike.”

Iron Mike nodded, licked his lips, and calculated his chances. He figured he could snap off a shot with the rifle. And get myself killed in the process, he thought. But he didn't hold with backing down from any man.

Fortunately, Junie Routh emerged from the hotel. She burst through the doorway that led to the hotel lobby. One of her girls had run upstairs to warn her of the ugly situation in the saloon. She wore a flowery purple dress with a ruff of lace covering her bodice. Yet despite her finery, Junie arrived ready for trouble. She brandished a broad-bladed carving knife, sharpened to a fare-thee-well, doubled edged and wicked looking. She sliced the air once for effect. “The next one of you jehus that makes trouble, I'll personally cut his pecker off and feed it to the wharf rats.”

She looked around the room, searched each man out, and cowed him with her angry stare. In her fury at being disturbed, she resembled more some mad harridan than the proprietor of a hotel and saloon: To emphasize the fact she meant business, Junie tossed a horribly shriveled, leathery-looking object onto a nearby table. “I've done it before.”

The men at the table looked in horror at the grisly trophy, gagged, and scrambled toward the nearest exit. Those that remained pretended to fade into the woodwork and tried to focus their attention elsewhere.

Iron Mike returned the rifle to Pritchard and staggered out the door. He disappeared into the stormy night.

“Let's open your pants and make you dance,” Junie Routh said, advancing on Pritchard. He dropped the rifle as if it were a live coal.

“We were just having a little fun,” he complained, keeping a table between himself and the madam.

“Behave yourself if you ever want to have more,” she warned. She glanced toward Tom, who held up his hands in surrender and pocketed his belly gun. Then to defuse the tension, Junie Routh tossed a handful of wooden “Free Screw” tokens onto the floor. The formerly cowed mixture of trappers and riverboatmen exploded into action and leapt for the tokens, overturning tables, and gouging and punching one another in the process.

She picked up the dried member from the table and crossed to Tom, who started to load the pistol he had fired.

“A poor night for riding,” Junie said, noting that Tom was garbed in his long black woolen greatcoat.

“I have business,” he said.

Junie Routh thought of Nate Harveson's attractive sister. “Are you certain you don't mean pleasure?”

“Business,” Tom replied and drew a note from his pocket and passed it to the madam. “A boy slid this under the door to my room.” Junie Routh opened the note and read softly aloud.

Milam
,

There is a matter between us that can only be settled on
the field of honor. I have no second but await your
convenience
.

Con Vogel